A Very Expensive Poison (3 page)

Either way, the contents of the report were passed back to the Kremlin. The nature of any subsequent conversation between Ivanov and Putin is unknown. But, weeks later, Lugovoi was on his way back to London with his partner Kovtun, this time in the role of assassin – on a mission to kill the author.

The origins of Litvinenko’s own bitter personal feud with Putin go back to the 1990s, and to Litvinenko’s career as an FSB officer. Those who knew him characterise Litvinenko as mercurial, dedicated and obsessive when on a case – a good sleuth or
operativnik
in an organisation riddled with wrong-doing.

Litvinenko had plenty of antecedents. Think Arkady Renko, the honest Soviet policeman who features in
Martin Cruz Smith’s
Gorky Park.
Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb would liken him to the eponymous hero of
Serpico
, the 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, in which a decent cop goes undercover to expose corruption inside his own force. Others would bend the rules, cheat, lie. Litvinenko refused. He would stick to the truth and the law.

Another friend and fellow exile, Viktor Suvorov, likened Litvinenko to a different literary character, from Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel
The Three Musketeers.
Like everyone who knew him, Suvorov referred to Litvinenko as Sasha. ‘Sasha was pure D’Artagnan,’ Suvorov said. ‘He was tall, handsome, sporty and open.’ He added: ‘He met so many real criminals. He understood really bad people, how bad they were. And yet he was very optimistic. He still believed in humankind.’

Litvinenko was born on 12 December 1962 in the Russian city of Voronezh. He had something of a fractured childhood. His parents, Walter and Svetlana, divorced when he was a baby; he grew up with his grandparents in the city of Nalchik, in Russia’s wild north Caucasus, close to the mountains. In between he had stints living with his mother in Moscow and an aunt in a town called Morozovsk. He went to secondary school in Nalchik.

His grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call the Second World War. A month before he was due to be called up for national service at the age of seventeen, Litvinenko enlisted in the army. Between 1981 and 1985 he attended a Soviet military academy in Ordzhonikidze, now called Vladikavkaz. Vladikavkaz,
in north Ossetia, is Russia’s gateway to the Caucasus: a place of rugged beauty, hillside fortresses and heavy skies prone to mist and rain.

In 1988, Litvinenko got transferred to a special division of the ministry of internal affairs. Here, in Moscow, the KGB hired him. Litvinenko began work in military counter-intelligence. In 1991, he joined the department that combated organised crime, corruption and terrorism. With the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the KGB ceased to exist and Litvinenko’s unit became part of the new FSK. In 1993 the FSK was renamed the FSB.

When still at military school and aged just twenty, Litvinenko married Natalia. He became the father of two small children, Sonya and Alexander. The relationship failed and by 1993 the couple were estranged. That summer – on 16 June – Litvinenko met his future second wife Marina, a ballroom dancing teacher. She had been married before too. It was her birthday party.

Marina was slim and attractive, with short blonde hair, boyishly cut, high cheekbones and clear blue eyes. She cut a gamine figure; her clothes smart and understated verging on conservative; earrings a single stud. I got to know her much later. What makes Marina extraordinary is her warm personality. She is someone of high emotional intelligence: concerned for others, friendly, affectionate, tactile. And – this came later too – courageous.

Before the party, two of Marina’s close friends had been receiving threats from some former business partners over a ballroom dancing trip to Sri Lanka that had gone wrong. Frightened, the couple went to a police
station. There they met Litvinenko – a senior FSB officer – who took the unusual step of offering them his personal protection. Marina’s friends were impressed. Litvinenko struck them as professional and calm. They brought him along to Marina’s birthday celebration.

Litvinenko was meant to be on holiday but he worked on the case flat-out. This was characteristic: once gripped by an assignment Litvinenko would often not sleep for three days. After rows with Natalia he moved out and lodged with his mother. That autumn he and Marina began living together. In summer 1994 they had a son, Anatoly; they married a few months later. It would be a happy partnership.

Three months later, in December 1994, Boris Yeltsin launched an attack on the rebel republic of Chechnya, in what was to become the First Chechen War. The goal was to wipe out Chechnya’s bid for independence. The Kremlin anticipated quick, decisive victory. Instead, the invasion turned into a bloody disaster for Moscow, with the Russian tank force sent on New Year’s Eve to re-take Chechnya’s capital Grozny destroyed and the army humiliated.

Litvinenko had grown up in the Caucasus; he understood the mentality of southern Russia’s majority Muslim population. In 1995, the FSB sent him back to Nalchik, to offer communications support to the forces fighting close by. At first Litvinenko supported Yeltsin’s war. Gradually, however, he grew disillusioned – with the Russian army’s brutal methods and with the president’s political goals, seemingly driven by imperial pique.

In January 1996, the Chechen guerrilla leader Salman Raduyev raided the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, near the Chechen border. His fighters seized the local hospital. They took 3,000 people hostage. After negotiations, Raduyev was allowed to return to Chechnya, with his fighters and 160 hostages. His convoy got as far as the last village before the border, Pervomaiskoye. A Russian helicopter gunship opened fire on the lead bus; the Chechens took cover in nearby cottages.

Litvinenko was sent with his FSB team into what was to become a hellish siege. Russian forces surrounded the village for five days – then bombarded it with tank fire and Grad missiles. On the ninth day of the crisis, the surviving rebels with their hostages broke out of the encirclement at night, fleeing across a field under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. At least twenty-nine civilians and 200 combatants from both sides perished.

According to Marina, the slaughter had a profound affect on Litvinenko. The themes were familiar: the Russian state’s indifference to civilian casualties, and the incompetence of its military command. He returned to Moscow in poor shape. ‘He looked very bad, his hands and feet were frozen, and he needed a week to recover,’ Marina said. His sympathy for Chechens and their struggle against the centre grew; it would later become a journalistic obsession and a future area of conflict with Putin.

During this same period, Litvinenko met and became friendly with a man named Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was a mathematician and academic who had gone into business as the Soviet Union collapsed. Like a determined
object pushing at a tough membrane, he had penetrated Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. He published the president’s memoirs and became friends with Yeltsin’s influential daughter Tatyana Yumasheva.

Berezovsky was Jewish, clever, unscrupulous, self-promoting, ambitious, solipsistic, chameleon-like – a whirlwind of restless energy and speech. Asked years later what the appeal was of being with Berezovsky, Litvinenko’s friend Alex Goldfarb – who worked for him – answered simply: ‘It was fun.’

This was a moment in which Yeltsin, his poll ratings dismal ahead of Russia’s 1996 presidential election, made a deal with a small group of businessmen. These were the oligarchs. They agreed to get Yeltsin re-elected. In return the president, in effect, sold them Russian state assets at crazily low prices. Berezovsky acquired an interest in a major oil firm, Sibneft, together with a young oil trader called Roman Abramovich.

As Berezovsky told it, his rise to power and influence made him enemies. Especially inside the former KGB. Russia’s spy agencies were on the back foot following the KGB’s failed coup in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev. Berezovsky said he urged Yeltsin to rein in the new FSB, and to debar former KGB operatives from high office. Russia needed to go through the same ‘lustration’ process that east Germany and the new Czech Republic went through after the fall of communism, he said.

The FSB, however, had plans of its own. Its goal was to regain the KGB’s lost supremacy. As Berezovsky later put it to British detectives: ‘KGB never disappeared. They were
shocked because of [democratic] revolution in Russia. Step by step they start[ed] to understand what happened and to get back control.’ Yeltsin, he said, did ‘strong damage’ to them, but ‘nevertheless they were trying all the time to organise’. The FSB ‘didn’t like’ him, he said.

Berezovsky’s nerve centre was the LogoVAZ Club, a hunting lodge in the centre of Moscow. In 1994, Berezovsky left this office, climbed into the back of his Mercedes, and sped off. A car bomb exploded, killing his driver and severely injuring his bodyguard. Berezovsky survived and spent two weeks in Switzerland recuperating. The FSB used this attempted assassination as an excuse to dispatch Litvinenko to investigate Berezovsky and keep an eye on his affairs.

This was the beginning of a relationship that would define Litvinenko’s life. In March 1995, a gunman shot dead Vladimir Listyev, Russia’s most popular TV anchor, in the stairwell of his Moscow apartment. Listyev was the head of ORT, Russia’s first channel. Suspicion fell on Berezovsky, who had just taken over ORT together with a Georgian billionaire, Badri Patarkatsishvili. Berezovsky denied involvement; we don’t know who was responsible but it would certainly have been unlike him to use those methods. He flew back to Moscow from London.

When Moscow police came to arrest Berezovsky, Litvinenko went to the scene. He realised that in custody Berezovsky’s life was at risk: it was not unknown for the authorities to cause ‘accidents’ to happen behind closed doors. What happened next, Berezovsky told Scotland Yard, was ‘very unusual’: ‘He [Litvinenko] took his gun
and said [to the police] if you try and catch him now I’ll kill you.’ Litvinenko called the head of the FSB, who agreed to give an order to protect Berezovsky. The police retreated and left.

At the time, Berezovsky scarcely knew Litvinenko, the good Samaritan. Afterwards, he said, they became ‘very close’. Marina Litvinenko said: ‘Boris said many times Sasha [Alexander] saved his life, and he was very grateful.’ Litvinenko was still working for the FSB but from then on became an informal part of Berezovsky’s entourage.

Meanwhile, Litvinenko was growing disenchanted with the leadership of his own organisation. The FSB was riddled with corruption, he learned. In 1997, he was posted to the FSB’s directorate for the investigation and prevention of organised crime, a covert unit known by the initials URPO. ‘It was the most secret department. It was FSB within FSB,’ Litvinenko said. His boss was Major General Evgeny Khokholkov. Unbeknown to General Khokholkov, Litvinenko had investigated him before. And been horrified at what he found.

Back in 1993, Litvinenko had investigated a group of bent FSB officers. He discovered that the officers – all members of the Uzbek KGB, transferred to Moscow – were taking bribes from an oil trader. The officers reported to Khokholkov. Khokholkov was also receiving protection money from Central Asian drug lords. Heroin was travelling from northern Afghanistan to Europe via Russia, with Khokholkov allegedly taking a cut.

The URPO special operations unit had its own secret office, away from the FSB’s headquarters in the
Lubyanka building in central Moscow. URPO had been set up to perform ‘special tasks’ – including, if necessary, extra-judicial murder. Litvinenko, to his growing dismay, soon found himself expected to carry out unlawful activities as part of his new assignment. He received orders to detain and beat up a former FSB officer turned whistleblower called Mikhail Trepashkin. He was also instructed to kidnap a rich Moscow-based Chechen businessman, Umar Jabrailov. If necessary, Litvinenko was told to shoot Jabrailov’s police bodyguards. Litvinenko refused to obey.

But it was another order from a senior colleague that would provoke a political scandal and Litvinenko’s dismissal from the FSB. Yeltsin had appointed Berezovsky deputy head of the security council. Berezovsky helped to negotiate a peace deal with the Chechen rebels. Hardliners viewed this agreement as treachery – and Berezovsky as its perfidious architect.

One day, Litvinenko’s superior Alexander Kamishnikov came up to him. According to Litvinenko, he began by saying: ‘Look, we must be a true successor to the KGB, we must have continuity and you must defend the Motherland, you must discharge your duties properly. We have fallen on hard times, difficult times, and we must be firm and strong.’

Litvinenko was uncertain what to make of this speech. Kamishnikov, however, then continued: ‘Litvinenko, you know Berezvosky well, you must kill him.’

Litvinenko later told UK Home Office officials: ‘I could hardly believe what he had said and asked him 
if he was serious. He moved closer and repeated: “You must kill Berezovsky. Russia has fallen on hard times and there are people who are very rich who have robbed our Motherland; they have corrupted authorities and they are buying everyone in authority.”’ Kamishnikov said that a legal route would, of course, be preferable but in order to save the country it was necessary for Berezovsky ‘to be destroyed’.

According to Marina Litvinenko, the conversation left her husband ‘unhappy and nervous’ for two months. In the best traditions of Soviet conspiracy, the order wasn’t written down. Nonetheless, it was an order – one that Litvinenko viewed as tantamount to illegal terrorist activity.

Litvinenko tried to figure out what to do. It was New Year, and Berezovsky had gone to Switzerland for treatment after tumbling off his snowmobile. In March 1998, he finally tracked Berezovsky down to his dacha and told him about the conversation. Berezovsky refused to believe him. Litvinenko returned with several of his URPO colleagues – Andrei Ponkin, Konstantin Latyshonok and German Shcheglov. They persuaded Berezovsky the murder plot was genuine. Shocked, Berezovsky took the evidence to the deputy chief of Yeltsin’s private office.